Internet delivery of digital content to IPTVs continues to increase, giving rise to an equally challenging issue of content navigation and management. Because of the IPTV's unique situation of being a shared device that is controlled by a simple input device, it is difficult to find an ingenious solution that will resolve this issue without excessively raising hardware costs, especially for users whose native language and familiar character set are not supported by the IPTV. It is impractical to make a remote controller for all possible functions, because the same will significantly increase costs. It is also difficult to navigate around a large IPTV screen, searching for content, without disturbing the viewing experience of other users. Consequently, issues of cumbersome data entry, limitations in memory and processing power, difficulties in effective content searches and the traditional, but limited, one-to-one interaction with the IPTV remain as major obstacles.
In addition, due to memory limitations associated with costs, a limited set of character font sets are available on content playback devices such as IPTVs. The availability of character font sets is usually dependent on the target market of the product. However, as society becomes ever more global, every market is likely to have significant numbers of users who speak and read languages not available on IPTVs.
In addition, yet another limitation of the IPTV is that, at any one time, the same can only display text in a single language.